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Tuesday, August 20, 2013

“Transforming as Magic”: on Gaga’s GMA appearance and official video release for “Applause” (a partially ekphrastic set of working notes)

By
Sarah Cook

1.
“I live for making you happy.”

Interview and official video premier on
Good Morning America, August 19th, 2013.

The dynamics of fame, of fandom and
obsession – an “obsession with transforming” – the expectations of hundreds of
thousands of thousands of fans:

“obsessed, obsessed, obsessed about the music.”

When, and where, does failure come in? There
will always be failure when so many people are counting on you; that’s fame.
But there seems to be another type of failure at play in Gaga’s work: failure
as a method; failure
as queer – failure as allowing the
unsayable to be said. To quote John Pluecker, “I’ve been thinking about how
best to fail in this piece. And in failing come to say this thing that I
haven’t been able to say.”

That which Gaga communicates by failing,
which cannot be expressed any other way.

Failure: a broken body, dancing –
writhing – on a mattress because of injury.

It’s a campaign. Of failure. Of interaction: her platform for communication
with her little monsters, indicated by the motherboard
chair on which she sits during her interview, by the shaking of hands as she
walks through a crowd of fans. The hands that reciprocate the music by applauding.
More on hands later.

2.
A campaign for the Jester.

The wise fool, the entertainer in makeup,
the character whose purpose is to make people react: through laughter, through
bodily reaction, through an ultimate signal of appreciation via applause.
Gaga’s “ode to the jester,” as she called it in her GMA interview, has been
discussed thoroughly here.

What will the evolution of the jester
look like? There are moments in Shakespeare where we don’t actually know
whether the jester is man or woman. I’m thinking specifically of my most recent
readings of King Lear and Twelfth Night and the surrounding
ambiguity of gender. Readers assume,
perhaps, that the jester is a male figure by some sort of ingrained default.
But is this character actually a platform for interrogation of the gender
binary? Is Gaga, as jester, a man? Or a woman?

What about cyborg jester? Monstrous
jester?

How is a female jester supposed to look?
Are women still pretty once they are funny?

Image: “Gaga” as word. The language is
both visual and musical. “Gaga” as sound.

“My kind of music that
I make is the kind that you look at.”

So she spells the letters our on her hands, a-r-t-p-o-p.

Image: Gaga as Venus. Not coming out of a
half shell, but from within hands.

A product of the hands – she embodies the sound they make.

The intimate relationship between sound and body.

Image: Gaga’s hand bra, accompanied by a
hand wrapped around her neck. Image: the failing jester getting pulled
off-stage by the handle of a cane slipped around the neck. Image: ghost hands
wrapped around Gaga’s body – like hands that want to censor – but they belong to
no one but her fashion, which is a part of who she is. The hands on her body are her body. Image: the sound of
applause on the body, the kind of sound
you look at.

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

No
– what is the sound of paws?

Image: Gaga as swan.

Image: Sitting in an upside down magic
top hat, standing in for the rabbit.

Image: Stewing in a cauldron. Gesturing
toward the image of the female witch, yet she’s an ingredient, a part of the
potion itself.

which began the performance: the
countdown to the video, which symbolically premiered at the push of a big red
button, with none other than Gaga’s own hands.

5.
The eye-mirror.

We see this at the end of the video for
only a brief second. I had to actually pause the video multiple times to feel
like I got the chance to really see this, and for a while I was sure, based on
how her lower hand was moving, that something was falling or being dropped in
the process.

She’s wearing an eye mask. It’s colorful,
even playful. It looks handmade, maybe even designed to look like animal eyes.
I was thinking frog. On her left eye: a mirror underneath the eye, which snaps
open and shut. She’s holding it open, and right as we see it, she lets go, the
mirror snaps shut, leaving only eye.

The implication: beneath the device with
which she gazes out at us, her adoring fans, we find a reflective surface; like
the surface of the jester, who entertains and acts as wise fool, perhaps
suggesting more about the truth of our own daily, social interactions than we
readily admit or choose to see. But when it’s a mirror pointing back at you,
it’s not a choice of seeing yourself or not: the reflection is just there.
Consider Lear’s fool and what he communicates about the scenes in which we find
him; consider Feste. In our dismissal of the fool, we are always dismissing a
bit of truth, a bit of ourselves.

But this mirror: when we gaze into Gaga’s
varying images, we are gazing into our varying selves. The implications, then,
on failure. On our dismissal of her as failure and what this says about us. On
our tendency to be shocked by what we see. We are, in fact, our own shocking
creatures.

By counting down to the applause, you are not just counting down
to something, but to the end of
something. Applause doesn’t just signal appreciation. In fact, it can often be
obligatory, a part of social etiquette, a way of indexing the audience’s
presence and some varying amount of participation/digestion: something has been
viewed, consumed, witnessed. That’s the thing: applause signals the end, that
something is done, that it’s over…

Image: the new Haus of Gaga video:

“She’s over. Lady Gaga
is over.”

And we, as
the other side of the equation, applaud to confirm this.

+ +

Quotes are taken directly from Gaga’s
dialogue on Good Morning America, unless otherwise noted.

Author Bio:

Sarah Cook
is an MA candidate at the University of Maine, where she's focusing on poetics,
creative writing and gender studies. Recent work can be found in gesture,
Phoebe, and Horse Nihilist, and is forthcoming in Vector Press and SWINE. Her
newest chapbook, a meadowed king, is out from dancing girl press.

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Established in March 2010 as the first mover in Gaga studies,Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art About Lady Gaga is a technological journal that critically-creatively participates in the cultural project of shock pop phenomenon Lady Gaga. Keeping with the spirit of our zeitgeist, Gaga Stigmata moves at the speed of pop.

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Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based writer, artist, and founding editor of Gaga Stigmata. She is the author of the books The Ravenous Audience, E! Entertainment, Kim's Fairytale Wedding, and, with Amaranth Borsuk, ABRA.Visit her website.

Meghan Vicks holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature.

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